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This paper aims to investigate the role of field-configuring events (FCEs) and situational context in the institutionalisation of sustainability reporting (SR) in Pakistan.

This paper uses insights from the institutional logics perspective and qualitative research design to analyse the interplay of the institutional logics, FCEs, situational context and social actors’ agency for the institutionalisation of SR among leading corporations in Pakistan. A total of 28 semi-structured interviews were carried out and were supplemented by analysis of secondary data including reports, newspaper articles and books.

The emerging field of SR in Pakistan is shaped by societal institutions, where key social actors (regulators, enablers and reporters) were involved in the institutionalisation of SR through FCEs. FCEs provided space for agency and were intentionally designed by key social actors to promote SR in Pakistan. The situational context connected the case organisations with FCEs and field-level institutional logics that shaped their decision to initiate SR. Overall, intricate interplay of institutional logics, FCEs, situational context and social actors’ agency has contributed to the institutionalisation of SR in Pakistan. Corporate managers navigated institutional logics based on situational context and initiated SR that is aligned with corporate goals and stakeholder expectations.

For corporate managers, this paper highlights the role of active agency in navigating and integrating institutional logics and stakeholders’ expectations in their decision-making process. For practitioners and policymakers, this paper highlights the importance of FCEs and situational context in the emergence and institutionalisation of SR in developing countries. From a societal point of view, dominance of business actors in FCEs highlights the need for non-business actors to participate in FCEs to shape logics and practice of SR for wider societal benefits.

From a societal point of view, dominance of business actors in FCEs highlights the need for non-business actors to participate in FCEs to shape logics and practice of SR for wider societal benefits.

This paper focuses on the role of FCEs and situational context as key social mechanisms for explaining the institutionalisation of SR.

Organization studies in India has largely remained insular to the writings of Indian scholars in parent disciplines such as sociology. The lack of engagement with Indian sociological works has promoted excessive dependence on Euro–American theory. It has further hindered the development of indigenous theories. This paper aims to argue that engagement with the writings of classical and contemporary Indian sociologists can resolve this issue.

The paper delineates the contribution of Indian sociologists to organizational or sociological institutionalism. It focuses specifically on the contribution of these scholars concerning two subtopics: conceptualization of institutions and fields, and the dynamics of institutional change.

The paper draws upon the work of Indian sociologists to develop a concept of ecological field. It further delves into the dynamic interplay between ideas and institutional change. More precisely, it draws attention to the role of actors and mechanisms that produce ideas.

Future studies can leverage the contribution of Indian scholars to explicate, elaborate and develop creative theories of organizational institutionalism. Such cumulative efforts can help in building an Indian tradition of organizational institutionalism.

This study aims to explore the potential dynamics between performance measurement at the organisational level and emerging urban development projects at the macro-institutional field level of sustainability governance and accountability.

Using a theoretical triangulation between three theories, namely contingency theory, institutional theory and social cognitive theory, this study investigates not only the macro-micro dynamics, but also the (recursive) micro-macro dynamics between performance measurement and urban development. Using an Egyptian public sector urban development organisation and its sustainable energy project as an empirical example, interviews, documents and observations were collected.

The dynamics emerged between field urban development projects and the (unintended) organisational implementation of the performance measurement system, the sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) reporting system. Contributing to previous literature, these dynamics have been institutionalised through (three) interrelated levels: the (macro-field) urban development contingencies and pressures for sustainability KPIs reporting, the (organisational) institutionalisation of the urban development performance measurement system and then the (micro-organisational) cognitive role of sustainability KPIs reports in (re)making political urban development decisions.

This study faced some limitations that paved the way for future research axes. For political and security reasons, difficulties were encountered in conducting interviews with government actors in the sustainable energy project under study. Also, due to the practical separation of the environmental sustainability system from the sustainability KPIs reporting system in this case study, environmental sustainability is outside the scope.

Sustainability reports may influence public sector decision-making processes in a specific urban development context. These KPIs reports may also increase public sector management opportunities for urban auditing, transparency, accountability and sustainability governance. These KPIs may also guide public sector management to lower prices in poor villages to increase smart energy consumption and improve community health.

Sustainability reports may increase decision-makers' understanding of consumer behaviours and societal changes. This may help in making appropriate political decisions to improve their welfare and regular smart energy consumption. Not only urban citizens, but this social advantage may also extend to urban development employees through employees' promotion, training and access to government-funded academic and professional scholarships.

This study is an attempt to develop current public sector performance measurement analyses in the emerging urban development field using a triadic analytical approach. This study also fed the literature with an extended case study that clarified the (multi-level) and (two-way) dynamics between performance measurement and urban development.

Neo-institutional theories and their constructs have so far only received limited attention in supply chain management literature. As recent supply chain disruptions and their ripple effects affect actors on a broader institutional level, supply chains are confronted with multiple new and emerging, often conflicting, institutional demands. This study aims to unpack the notion of institutional complexity behind supply chain disruptions and present a novel institutional framework to lower supply chain susceptibility and increase supply chain resilience.

The authors identify the patterns of complexity that shape the supply chain susceptibility, namely, distance, diversity and ambiguity, and present three institutional responses to susceptibility to increase supply chain resilience, namely, institutional entrepreneurship, institutional alignment and institutional layering.

This paper analyses the current situational relevance to better understand the various and patterned ways how logics influence both supply chain susceptibility and the supply chain resilience. The authors derive six propositions on how complexity can be reduced for supply chain susceptibility and can be increased for supply chain resilience.

By expanding and extending research on institutional complexity to supply chains, the authors broaden how researchers in supply chain management view supply chain susceptibility, thereby providing managers with theory to think differently about supply chains and its resilience.

This book chapter takes an institutional perspective on competing logics in global markets concerned with sustainability values and how market actors in the form of buyers and sellers attempt to solve these conflicting situations. We do this by identifying competing institutional logics in global market contexts aiming for sustainability values, together with techniques for navigating these competing institutional logics in the organizational field studied. As an empirical illustration, we use a case study of buyers and sellers in two different markets where sustainability has come into focus for their market relationships. This viewpoint allows us to better understand how global market actors deal with the competing institutional logics in their market context. We make three contributions with this research: firstly, we identify the institutional logics in global markets towards sustainability; secondly, we demonstrate how global market actors prioritize among the competing logics and their market relationships and thirdly, we outline what this means for the relationship between buyers and sellers in global markets towards sustainability.

Once introduced and conceptualized as a factor that causes erosion and decay of social institutions and subsequent deinstitutionalization, the notion of entropy is at odds with predictions of institutional isomorphism and seems to directly contradict the tendency toward ever-increasing institutionalization. The purpose of this paper is to offer a resolution of this theoretical inconsistency by revisiting the meaning of entropy and reconceptualizing institutionalization from an information-theoretic point of view.

It is a theoretical paper that offers an information perspective on institutionalization.

A mistaken understanding of the nature and role of entropy in the institutional theory is caused by conceptualizing it as a force that counteracts institutional tendencies and acts in opposite direction. Once institutionalization and homogeneity are seen as a product of natural tendencies in the organizational field, the role of entropy becomes clear. Entropy manifests itself at the level of information processing and corresponds with increasing uncertainty and the decrease of the value of information. Institutionalization thus can be seen as a special case of an increase in entropy and a decrease of knowledge. Institutionalization is a state of maximum entropy.

It is explained why institutionalization and institutional persistence are what to be expected in the long run and why information entropy contributes to this tendency. Contrary to the tenets of the institutional work perspective, no intentional efforts of individuals and collective actors are needed to maintain institutions. In this respect, the paper contributes to the view of institutional theory as a theory of self-organization.

Institutional theory assumes practice adoption and subsequent decoupling. However, there is a range of alternative organizational theories that challenge this view and offer instead their reinterpretation, extension and modification of institutional predictions with regard to the adoption and possible range of various responses and processes that follow the decision to adopt. This paper aims to review this spectrum of theories and suggest how they clarify, supplement, correct, restrict and/or abandon some institutional explanations and predictions.

Extensions and alternatives to institutional theory are mainly motivated by the need to have a theory of practice adoption and variation, and a plethora of alternative practice adoption theories currently exists in the literature. The authors review these theories and compare them against institutional theory and against each other.

The analysis revealed shortcomings and advantages of alternative theories compared to institutional theory and against each other. It is suggested which theory is most useful in each domain of application. The authors review and compare institutional theory, Scandinavian institutionalism, management fashion theory, virus theory and institutional inertia theory and analyze how and whether they are able to reproduce the success of institutional theory and successfully address and resolve its shortcomings and gaps. The authors conclude by discussing whether regular emergences of new theories that account for the idea-handling stage of diffusion signals institutional theory’s limit of validity in this domain.

The problem of idea emergence/diffusion/disappearance and adoption/variation/use are fundamentally different, but both of them motivated researchers to go beyond institutional theory. Despite being the dominant theory of organizations internally consistent and explaining a wide range of empirical observations, it is evident that institutional theory is not a complete theory. This paper contributes to this problem by exploring and comparing existing candidates for practice variation theory.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate different strands of institutional theory within the internationalization process of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in developed and emerging economies. In the light of this purpose, the authors try to fill the gap in the literature through analysing the main institutional theories: neo-institutionalism, new institutional economics, comparative capitalism and the institution-based view. Therefore, the main concern is to determine the distribution of different strands of institutional theory in its subfields in this study.

This study provides a profound analysis of different strands of institutional theory within the period from 1990 to 2018 in a larger sample. With a qualitative content analysis, authors reviewed 150 articles using different strands of institutional theory at both theoretical and analytical level and accessed 25 journals published in Social Science Citations Index between 1990 and 2018. In this study, authors used the inductive approach and the qualitative content analysis (Duriau et al., 2007) and adopted a research method to investigate different strands of institutional theory within the internationalization process of MNEs in developed and emerging markets (EMs).

Coders have synthesized the strands of institutional theory in detail to analyse the theoretical contribution of the study. The strands of institutional theory have been analysed both by institutional perspective and citation analysis. Coders classify the analysis level into three main categories. These are country, headquarter and subsidiary level. Our findings are related to the basic determinants and assumptions of different strands of institutional theory. Because in new institutional economics, analysis levels are country and industry. On the other hand in institution-based view, analysis levels are country and firm. Finally in comparative capitalism, analysis levels are country and region and, in neo-institutionalism analysis level is organization itself. In this study, findings show that sociology-based institutional strands, especially neo-institutionalism, are more preferred than other theories.

This study’s content analysis is limited to scope of selected journals. However, this study may suffer from publication bias. The authors examined only peer-reviewed articles from selected journals and did not include book chapters, book reviews, editor and special issue editor articles, research notes, conference papers and congress invitations. The important theoretical limitation of this study is to clarify the different strands of institutional theory in international business literature (Aguilera and Grøgaard, 2019). The firm size of MNEs is not included in this study, but it should be involved in coding categories in future studies.

This study provides the largest sample up to now and covers developed markets and EMs. Authors analysed this research from four perspectives: theoretical foundation, methodology, location and entry mode choices. On the other hand, this study shows that the institutional environment not only mitigates or mediates the effects but also directs the effects on foreign direct investment’s internationalization process of location choice and entry strategies.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the usefulness of institutional theory to critical studies. It pursues this topic by exploring some of the possibilities for allocating local authority funds more fairly for poor residents. This paper aims to shed light on the institution of budgeting in a democratically elected local government under austerity.

This paper uses world culture theory, the study of the devolution of cultural authority to individuals and organisations through which they turn into agentic actors. Based on a field study of Newcastle City Council’s (NCC’s) budget-related practices, the paper uses the notion of actorhood to explore the use of fairness in austerity budgets.

This paper documents how new concerns with fairness gave rise to new local authority practices and gave NCC characteristics of actorhood. This paper also shows why it might make sense for a local authority that is managing austerity budget cuts and cutting back on services to make more detailed performance information public, rather than attempting to hide service deterioration, as some prior literature suggests. This paper delineates the limits to actorhood, in this study’s case, principally the inability to overcome structural constraints of legal state power.

The paper is suggestive of ways in which local government can fight inequality in opposition to central government austerity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative accounting study of actorhood. It coins the phrase fairness assemblage to denote a combination of various accounting technologies, organisational elements and local government practices.